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Maj. Gen'l HENRY W. UWTON 



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FUNERAL ORATION 

AT OBSEQUIES OF 

Major General HENRY W. LAWTON, 

U. S. VOLUNTEERS, 

BY 

Professor M. WOOLSEY STRYKER, 

D. D., LL.D. 

CHURCH OF THE COVENANT, 

February 9, 1900, 

WASHINGTON CITY. 









57^454 



Gibson Bros., 

Printers and Bookbinders, 

Washington, D. C. 



Under the broad seas, and across the land of his love and 
loyalty, seven weeks gone, the heavy tidings whispered o'er 
the world's diameter that on the i8th of December, 1899, 
General Henry W. Lawton, of the United States Army, 
had " given the last full measure of devotion," and under 
that peremptory shot which was all but the last bolt of the 
retiring storm, upon the very wave of victory, had fallen, 
instantly dead. The tears that gullied the cheeks of his 
brave men, as they lifted their hero's body to a temporary 
shelter, have been answered by the passionate sympathy 
and proud recognition of a Republic that is not ungrate- 
ful and that remembers, and will remember, those who in 
its supreme tasks have loved not their own lives. 

Over the width of the earth a soldier's household has 
brought its warrior home. The dust that the nation 
gathers to its guarding is that of no common man. We \ 
are met to celebrate and to mourn him. But while we re- 
call the record so compact with manliness, and which the 
white blossom of modesty crowns withal, while we recite 
the story of one who personified the best American tradi- 
tions, first this day do we regard her sorrow who treads that 
" solemn aisle of pain " the sanctity of whose shadows are 
accessible only to her God. And with her, we remember 
too, for his true sake who begat them, these four dear chil- 
dren—daughters of the army, wards of the people, and son 
whose best possession shall ever be his father's sword. Or- 
phaned of him indeed his children are, but endowed, too, 
with the immutable heritage of a gallant name. It is an 



estate which with all that appropriately pertains to it this 
land of pure domestic love will thoughtfully and thank- 
fully administer. 

" Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, 
the Father of mercies and God of all comfort ; who cora- 
forteth us in all our affliction, that we may be able to comfort 
them that are in any affliction, through the comfort where- 
with we ourselves are comforted of God." 

Hither we have come — the people's chosen head, and all 
authorities else from their high several sessions — to pay 
our poor but tender alms of love to an unblemished memory, 
to thank Him, who is our dwelling place in all generations, 
that the stout tree of liberty still yields such manner of 
fruitage, and to pledge ourselves, considering the issue of 
the lives of our renowned dead, to imitate their unblenching 
and unblighted faith. 

Station is secondary, humanity is primary. And what- 
ever else any is, to-day we all are only men and women, 
brothers and sisters, lifting as children our wet faces toward 
the consolations of God. The stars of the spangled flag, 
covering now this shape of its noble warden, shine multi- 
plied upon the dews of grief. But with a solemn joy, it 
beseems you, his comrades of the Army, to give thanks for 
the life whose end must (after this parenthesis of difficult 
farewells) be viewed not as a calamity but as a conquest. 
" Men unapt to weep " are smitten by the pathos of that 
courage we commemorate — courage, most touching of all 
human graces ; but let them also smile with exalted hope 
as they lay upon this soldier's sepulchre the chaplets of 
their homage. 

He was born March 17, 1843. Ohio rocked his cradle, 



Missouri and Iowa tutored his western spirit, Indiana yielded 
him to his whole country. A boy of eighteen, April i6, 1861, 
while scarcely had the acrid smoke drifted northward from 
Sumter, he gave all he had — himself — to the cause of an 
indissoluble Union. At once a sergeant, soon a lieutenant, 
ere long a colonel, he was in the forefront of it all — that 
brothers' woeful quarrel — until the happy day broke again 
upon a sacrifice completed and a flag untorn. At Shiloh, 
at Corinth, through the crimson strife in Tennessee and 
Georgia, he led and dared. He was medaled for dis- 
tinguished gallantry ; but he won what was more than 
that — the power even better yet to serve his country. The 
apprentice of great masters in a workshop where anvil 
answered hammer of like temper, when it ceased Lawton 
was a boy no more. 

He accepted a lieutenant's commission in the Regular 
Army in 1867. He was with the Infantry, with the Cavalry, 
with the Inspector's service. Having fought it out v^^ith the 
insurrectionary tribes for fifteen years, he was the picked man 
of men to track the Apaches to their last lair and to wrench 
the southwest from the terror of Geronimo and his band. 
As another has vividly said, " He hunted them off their 
feet." 

Ten years for him, next, of those accurate and delicate 
administrative tasks which, in the oxidizing times of peace, 
alone preserve an army's reality and readiness, years filled 
also with ardent and close study of the literature of his 
calling (for he was a prepared man and not an accident), 
and then the judgment drums of 1898 beat to quarters, 
the free flag blushed forth and signalled a sister star, the 
steel throats of the guns were charged with human wrath. 



M.. 



Never recant that year, ye who believe in America's con- 
science, nor write aught that is unworthy in the volume 
then begun ! 

Asking at once for active duty — and what soldierly soul 
in any way of life does not seek that ! — Lawton was major- 
general of volunteers at El Caney. Here was a man who 
" couldn't quit," and the crest was carried. Then it was 
his task as its provincial governor to purge Santiago of the 
varied dirt of centuries, and still he was " only a soldier." 

The last year came. It was January, 1899, when the 
shores of his fatherland hid behind the Atlantic's rim, and 
he was climbing over the ridge of the world to his final 
duty and his appointed end. 

" Suns haste to set, that so remoter lights 
Beckon the wanderer to his vaster home." 

We all were sure that General lyawton could do it and 
would ; that however Death might throw his heavy dice, 
this American would stride forward unappalled, purpose 
shrunken snug upon deed and tight as the steel jackets of 
the cannon. And he did it. His men were worn barefooted 
in the persistent rush, but cheerfully they pushed along — 
the rapid leading making a resistless following — until they 
were pounding the very back of that insurrection, of which, 
after all, Aguinaldo was but the local lieutenant. Lawton 
smote and overcame. The jungles were no obstacles, the 
mountains were stairs. He had won Santa Cruz, San Ra- 
fael, San Isidro, San Mateo, and there on the very day that 
his commission as Brigadier of Regulars had been engrossed 
his campaigning ended, he received a better promotion. 
Upon the field he was knighted by the accolade " of that 
Captain under whose colors he had fought so long," and 



his soul was redeemed in peace from the battle. Alas and 
Amen ! 

" What matters how or on what ground 
The freed soul its Creator found." 

Long has the way been ; but at last his native land re- 
ceives to her bosom all of him that could die, and with Ave 
et Vale takes his fame to her brow and his memory to her 
heart. Arlington, where armies sleep, opens her gates to 
the ashes that claim her keeping, which He who cradles 
the years shall guard well until " the reveille of the break- 
ing morn." Sound, biigles, your mournful last call ! Carry 
the echoes, ye million-tongued couriers of the air ! 

"And for his passage 
The soldier's music and the rites of wars speak loudly for him ! " 

Here the pall, the dead march, the committal and the 
volley ; but there the squadrons of light, the ranks of the 
white-clad army of martyrs, the peal of golden bells and 
the acclaim " Well done ! " Blessed and triumphant doom 
of the faithful servant ! 

" No soldier on service entangleth himself with the 
affairs of this life," and — " tide life, tide death " — this vet- 
eran of three wars was one who served not only " with a 
soldier's eye," but with an unrelenting will. The muscu- 
lar hand of his resolution wrought out the plan of his in- 
telligence and " thought death no hazard in this enterprise." 
No primrose path of dalliance ever allured his feet. No 
petty defects quarreled with his unalterable and intrepid 
fidelity. 

" He could not frame a word unfit, 
An act unworthy to be done." 

And as to-day we listen to the surf-beats of that eternity, 



8 

under whose rote pageantry tarnishes and language is be- 
numbed, we know again that 

" Wars must make examples out of their best." 

This better Plantagenet, this latest Bayard "without 
fear and without reproach," this modern Philip Sidney, 
whose life also was " poetry put into action," has shown 
once more of what a stuff is incorrigible manhood — in what 
substance root the memories that last. 

For a true poet (and so proven) is one who has written at 
least some things of which no poet that ever lived could 
have been ashamed, would gladly have owned ; and a true 
man is admitted to the fellowship of heroes by the equality 
and peerage of his supreme deeds. Here was one whom 
Raleigh, Gustavus Adolphus, William of Orange, Winkel- 
ried, Cambronne, Garibaldi, would know at sight. He 
was of that time-enduring breed which has made Agin- 
court and Naseby and Quebec and I^ucknow of immortal 
story. He was comrade to the Marylanders who guarded 
the retreat at Long Island, to the men who passed the Del- 
aware, who served the guns of Pleasanton, who soaked the 
sod of the Peach Orchard, who ran singing through the 
tide at Manila, who held Guantanamo. The soul was in 
him of tho.se who did business in great waters with Paul 
Jones and Lawrence and Truxton and Worden and Bag- 
ley — of all the line who yet are with us and which shall 
not be diminished though all the seas run red. He was in 
the spiritual loins of Joseph Warren and of Herkimer. 
He knew the secret and has saluted the souls of Mansfield 
and Sedgwick and Reynolds and McPherson and Phil. 
Kearney and Custer ! 



Let it be said, and let it be said here, that none of us is 
of those who walk backward into the future and translate 
the present upside down ! A tumid and carping pessimism 
lives only in the pluperfect, but good faith lives in the 
future perfect. The one is subjunctive, the other is indica- 
tive. Nay, duty is in the imperative and unconditional mood ! 
Great and embattled evils make resistance indispensable, 
and such resistance in the extreme event is war. Calamity 
war ever is ; but there are worse calamities ; for not pain, 
not cost, is a final criterion against what is best. 

When, in the name of mankind, and that peace might be 
real, we undertook in 1898 to cleanse the seas, we affirmed 
a principle and made a precedent that I, for one, hold to 
have written the most honorable leaf in all our history. 
But all that has been since was corollary to that. No 
special pleading of professional malcontents with whom 
wisdom will not die, no a priori abstraction, can unsay 
what this dead soldier's zeal said for America. Rather does 
such a death enjoin upon our purpose and performance such 
ends as shall vindicate us from cowardly indifferentism and 
evasion in the face of whatever duty, and however unex- 
pected or complex, enjoin us to regard and to teach liberty's 
authority. 

We do not welcome war, we deplore it ; but more de- 
plorable were a craven vacillation toward a riddle which 
must have room for its solution. For that room's sake, and 
for the peace it shall secure at last, we reverently invoke 
upon our arms the favor of the Lord of Hosts ! and though 
we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we will 
fear no evil. " In the name of our God will we set up our 
banners." 



lO 

The Arch-Leader of the migrations of men, the Coun- 
sellor " whose ways are higher than our ways " summons 
us to an imperial participation in the affairs of the round 
world — not for conquest and commerce sake, but for Christ's, 
who is " the resurrection and the life " for peoples too. 
He summons us from an isolated even though a continental 
selfishness, like that in which the palaces of self-contented 
Babylon became the abode of owls and satyrs — summons 
us, though we may not yet know the half of it, and though 
our thoughts are not His thoughts, to minister, as the mis- 
sionaries of the perfect law of liberty, toward the pacifica- 
tion of the globe, and unto the coronation of that Blessed 
and Only Potentate, " having neither beginning of days nor 
end of years," who in righteousness judges and makes war, 
and who is the Prince of Life. 

New meridians of relation, new zones of authority, new 
horizons of duty, — these with all their concomitant respon- 
sibilities ; but also with the assurance that He who lades 
the burden will strengthen the back, — that 

" Only the Master shall praise us 
And only the Master shall blame." 

Our faith, too, must needs be militant, dauntless, ready to 
die if need were, or else we are unworthy to touch the hem 
of this pall, which rather let us, in remembrance of one 
who fought our fight, press to our lips with kisses that are 
covenants — covenants that we henceforth will stand, as 
those that are " baptized for the dead," to advance our 
country's true cause, to purify and to exalt it. 

In some good day — not far away, please God — when 
those islands, foundlings no longer, shall have been rendered 
as a majestic deodand to civilization, to regulated freedom, 



II 



and to the God of these, there in fair Luzon, right where 
he fell, front to his duty, let the valiant frame of this true 
liberator rise in immutable bronze, while, understanding 
us at last, our brown brothers, gazing upon that statue, 
stature, statute, all in one, shall say — " He was America's ; 
but he is ours too — Lawton ! He was slain by us ignorantly 
in unbelief ; but he has forgiven." 



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